Eileen Heckart, an Oscar-winning actress who was born in Columbus? No statue.

As these examples show, one can make no assumptions regarding who has a statue and who doesn’t
around here. And that brings me to Arnold Schwarzenegger.

In one of those stories you can’t make up,
The Dispatch reported last week that Arnold had commissioned several 9-foot bronze statues
of himself that he apparently intends to send to favored locations. Columbus, home of the Arnold
Sports Festival, might be on the list.

Sending statues of yourself to places where you want to be immortalized seems somewhat at odds
with statue protocol, but Arnold didn’t get to be Arnold through self-restraint.

Perhaps he looked at the Columbus statue lineup and decided that the risk of going unbronzed was
too high to leave anything to chance.

I’ll give you three names, and you tell me which one doesn’t have a statue in Columbus: Sitting
Bull, Pepe the Penguin, World War I flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker.

The answer is Rickenbacker.

He was once so famous that Hollywood made a movie about him (Captain Eddie, 1945). His name is on an airport, and his boyhood home has been partially
restored. But he has no statue here. (I’m not counting grave monuments as statues.)

Sitting Bull — commissioned by real-estate developer Burkley Showe, an admirer of American
Indian art and culture — stands outside the offices of the Columbus Apartment Association at 1225
Dublin Rd. (Showe’s company once had its headquarters there; Sitting Bull was not into multifamily
housing.)

Pepe, the Kroger advertising penguin, is at the zoo.

That’s also the location of a bust of Colo, the first gorilla born in captivity. She is probably
the zoo’s second-most-famous primate, after Jack Hanna — who doesn’t have a statue.

If you were judging Ohio State University only by its statues, you might conclude that it’s more
of a dental factory than a football factory.

Woody Hayes, who remains larger than life 24 years after his death, has been impersonated on
Saturday Night Live, imprinted on a street sign and made the subject of a play. But he
lags behind two dentists in OSU statue prestige.

Standing outside the College of Dentistry are statues of Callahan, a pioneer in the field of
root-canal treatment; and Willoughby Dayton Miller, a tooth-decay researcher.